the emerging church 1
I began reflecting on chapter 1 of Dan Kimball’s book titled, “The Anti-Christian, Antichurch, Post-Christian Seekerâ€, quite a mouthful for a title. The author uses a real person, Sky, to illustrate what a post-modern seeker looks like. To Sky, Christianity is a man-made religion; Christians are close-minded, judgmental people; and Christians are arrogant to think they alone have the only true religion.
Kimball continues to deduce from Sky’s experience of conversion: “In fact, I later learned from Sky that if we had offered the type of things typically associated with a seeker-sinsitive service, he wouldn’t have been interested. If he was going to take the time to go to a church service, he told me, he wanted to experience an authentic spiritual event in which he could see if God was truly alive and being worshiped. If he attended the service his Christian friends went to, and discovered that we took away the crosses and anything that looked religious and didn’t open the Bible and had fewer times of prayer and singing, he would have felt Christians were either embarasssed by or were trying to hide what they believed. To him. this would have been hyocritical and even a turn-off to church.â€
Kimball’s conclusion is, “Many of the very things that we removed from our churches because they were stumbling blocks to seekers in previous generations are now the very things that are attractive to emerging generations.â€
I asked myself how much is the young urban Singaporean like Sky? Is his criticisms of the church and Christians the same as Sky’s? and realized that I do not know many pre-believers of the emerging generation in the first place. However I could assume, quite safely, that unlike the irreligious Sky, most of these Singaporeans would have a religion, even if it is followed as a family tradition, and many would think that all religions are the same and lead to God.
Any comments?
Add comment November 4th, 2006
